Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The censorship of the app is objectionable not only for the blatant power play that Apple made in silencing its critics, there is also a twisted sort of irony in its statement to Perdercini: In declaring the content of the app to be “excessively objectionable or crude,” Apple has, implicitly, endorsed this statement as a description of its own behavior because, of course, the app was about Apple’s business practice. This act of censorship also raises grave concerns over whether markets can be trusted to ensure the free flow of politically important information in a democratic society. The problem with Apple’s “walled garden” approach to the Web is that the walls appear to keep voices of dissent or even self-reflexivity away from the garden.